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Tuesday, April 14, 2009

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AARGAU, SWITZERLAND -- The Filipino community is elated over published news reports that the Swiss Parliament is set to discuss the hiring of Filipino nurses to help address Switzerland’s problem of its aging population.

The Swiss Federal Statistics Office had forecast that by 2050 the number of people over 65 would rise by 90 per cent to 2.2 million, or 27 per cent of the population. The current population of Switzerland is 7.7 million.

Hence the growing demand for nursing care in the country’s Alterheims (homes for the elderly), Pflegeheims (nursing homes) and in hospital geriatric wards.

Up to 30 percent of the current nurses are already Ausländer (foreigners), mostly coming from European Union neighbors Germany and France.

But Frank Wyss, secretary of the health directors’ conference of Switzerland, said the EU itself is already missing a trained workforce in nursing care, according to a news item from the German-language “Sonntag Zeitung” this month.

Wyss said health directors had opened the possibility of recruiting a nursing workforce from even far-away lands such as the Philippines.

“Filipinas are well-trained and educated and they are training more nursing staff than they need themselves,” was how Wyss defended the proposal.

The small community of Filipino nurses here said there is certainly room for more.

Concerns were raised by the Swiss over nursing care standards following a recent case of mistreatment and abuse of an elderly psychiatric patient in a hospital in Zürich. Nurses had reportedly ordered the patient to strip and dance naked and had taken photographs of the patient using a mobile phone. The incident raising raised howls of protest over the country.

But Lucy Camay said this would never happen with Filipino nurses “dahil masyadong pasensyoso tayo at iba ang ugali natin.”

Language as a requirementBut the nurses said newcomers would have to learn the local language in Switzerland, which has German, French, and Italian-speaking cantons, and even Swiss Reto-Romanish parts.

They said however, newcomers can learn the language through intensive six-to-12-month courses or through in-work language trainings offered by employers.

An estimated 15,000 Filipinos live and work in Switzerland, most of them in the main cities of Zürich, Geneva, Basel and Bern. There is a Philippine Embassy in Bern and a consulate in Geneva, although there is also an honorary Consul-General based in Basel.

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